Joe’s wonderful adventure
The political equivalent of a “perfect storm” produced the presidency of Donald Trump.
A similar series of unlikely events also now seems likely to limit that presidency to one term. Just as Trump was the beneficiary of an array of improbable happenings, failure of any of which to occur would have prevented his victory, so now is Joe Biden.
Trump won the Republican nomination because of the novelty of his campaign, because he got more media coverage than all the other GOP candidates combined (due to that novelty), and because his candidacy wasn’t taken seriously by those other candidates until it was too late — even after they should have fully realized the seriousness of the threat, Cruz, Kasich, Rubio and company proceeded to squabble among themselves and put their own ambitions above the welfare of their party and country, thereby failing to unite to stop the interloper.
The final piece fell into place when Trump drew an opponent in the fall that incongruously combined oblivious overconfidence with Trump-level un-favorability ratings.
Hillary Clinton to this day probably still wonders how she could have possibly lost to that guy; the hunch is that Trump will be thinking the same thing for the rest of his years.
The beginning of Biden’s own improbable journey came when the Democratic establishment did what the Republican establishment so miserably failed to do — unite to defeat a hostile takeover of their party, which in the Democratic case took the form of Bernie Sanders. Again, this had precious little to do with Joe and everything to do with the need to stop the Green Mountain Red; Biden simply became the means, the South Carolina primary the occasion.
The magnitude of Biden’s win in the Palmetto State was a testament to the determination to stop Bernie, but no one could have envisioned that the rest of the Democratic primary would become irrelevant because it was abruptly frozen in place by a virus.
The virus has been the key to everything that has happened since, allowing Biden to effectively conceal his greatest vulnerabilities while putting Trump’s fully on display.
As long as the virus dominated the headlines, Biden could stay where his advisers needed him to stay for as long as possible, which was as far away from the press and public as possible. The pretext for the longest spring break in the history of American political campaigns was the pandemic; the real reason was likely that Biden wasn’t physically or mentally up to a grueling primary schedule, followed by an even more intense general election campaign.
By basically allowing Biden to stay in his basement for five months, to, in effect, run out much of the clock, the virus also made it easier for him to manage the discrepancy between the hard-left policy demands of an increasingly hard-left Democratic Party base and the more moderate positions that would be necessary to appeal to those suburban women in swing states that will determine the outcome on Nov. 3.
With an assist from an obviously sympathetic media, Biden has managed to dodge issues like defunding the police, abolishing ICE, the Green New Deal, the Black Lives Matter riots, and banning fracking (in many cases by taking an ambiguous position one day and what seems to be a different ambiguous position the next day, obscuring in squid-like fashion as much as possible).
If the virus permitted Biden to stay in hiding and dodge the issues, it also was perfectly designed to fully reveal Trump’s shortcomings because it required precisely the kind of steady, reassuring leadership that Trump is incapable of providing. The subject couldn’t be changed, the public couldn’t be distracted, and the virus wouldn’t go away no matter how much name-calling and blustering Trump did.
The greatest and last threat for Biden was, of course, the presidential debates, wherein, without the pre-prepared questions, the scripted answers and his teleprompter to lean on, there existed potential for both full exposure of debility and inability to finesse issues in a way that would keep both the Bernie Bros and the soccer moms on board.
But even then Biden was saved by Trump when, in what will likely go down as the worst debate strategy since Richard Nixon turned down the offer of makeup, he tried to badger and interrupt Biden into a meltdown that would have likely come anyway if he’d just let the geezer talk. By helping turn the first, pivotal debate into WWF smackdown, Trump effectively let Biden off of the hook; incoherence being undetectable amid so much incoherence.
Trump’s testing positive for the virus was thus just the latest development to play neatly into the Biden strategy since the more the whirling dervish is sidelined, the easier it is for Biden to stay on the sidelines. What had threatened to become an unfavorable contrast the longer it stretched out — between the hyperactive, ever accessible Trump and the inactive, hidden-away Biden — was effectively muted by Trump’s forced inactivity.
Joe Biden might be the first person to win the presidency not because of who he is but who he isn’t. He isn’t Bernie Sanders and he isn’t Donald Trump. Which means he could just as easily have been a fence post.